Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 10, 1995 TAG: 9503100027
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JIM PATTERSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: FRANKLIN, TENN. LENGTH: Medium
Steppenwolf leader John Kay spent the 1980s turning the 1960s superstar act once mentioned in the same breath as Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge into a cottage industry with himself the focal point - the band now is billed on the road as John Kay & Steppenwolf.
He has put down roots in Tennessee and is taking the heavy metal band's act on the Internet.
It's another way to reach his fans without help from a media that isn't all that interested anymore.
``We're like a miniature of what the Deadheads have been doing for a long time,'' Kay said. ``They don't care about airplay, they have their own ... Internet.''
Wolfpackers, as Kay calls them, will soon also be able to contact each other and the band on-line. They already are kept abreast of tour dates and product by being on Kay's mailing list.
The Wolfpack would probably not exist if not for Kay's near-decade of work re-establishing the band's reputation after bogus Steppenwolf's began playing shows after the bands demise in 1972.
After a solo career failed, he rebuilt - one small club at a time - a band that played large stadiums at its peak. Kay moved to the Nashville area in 1989, and continued to cultivate the Steppenwolf legacy.
MCA has released a double-CD of greatest hits, and a new live album and video anthology are in the works.
And just try to turn on your local oldies radio station and not hear the band's trio of classics: ``Born To Be Wild,'' (which rose to No. 2 on the charts and served as a biker anthem in the 1968 film ``Easy Rider'') ``Magic Carpet Ride'' (which rose to No. 3) and ``The Pusher.''
Kay's recently published autobiography titled ``Magic Carpet Ride'' (Quarry Press, 372 pages, $16.95) necessarily tells about the band's glory days of gold records and excess.
Much more interesting, though, is Kay's life before and after.
Born April 12, 1944, as Joachim Krauledat in Germany and legally blind at birth, Kay was spirited across the East German border by his mother when he was 4 to look for a better life, starting with improved eye care.
His journey from West Germany to Canada to California to Tennessee, from blues-playing vagabond to rock superstar, betrays a stubborn spirit much like the main character from the Herman Hesse novel his band is named after.
``Hesse's character was a loner,'' Kay writes in his autobiography, ``a man drifting in the no man's land that separates true idealism and individualism from a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle with all its hypocrisy, never being totally at peace in either camp.''
Besides the people who have followed Steppenwolf since the early days, Kay said, a fair contingent of teen-agers count themselves as fans, too.
``As their letters usually explain,'' Kay said, ``they find something in what we do that goes beyond just strictly negativism - which is a sort of X Generation grunge rock, everything is [messed up]so what's the point?''
by CNB